Author: Roberta Grimes

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Raindrops are falling on my head.
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed,
Nothing seems to fit.
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… So I just did me some talking to the sun,
And I told him I didn’t like the way he got things done.
Sleeping on the job!
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

… But there’s one thing I know.
The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me,
it won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me!
– Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)

I still can remember the banner year of 1970 as if it were yesterday. I was right out of college, living in Boston, and working for a big life insurance company. My job was to program in Cobol an IBM 360 computer that had just a tiny fraction of the power of my modern cellphone, even though that nearly useless early computer took up one entire floor of a downtown office building. There was a war still going on in Vietnam that year, but it never had really hit home for me because the love of my life had not yet been drafted. And besides, what was the point of worrying about a war that was going on half a world away, when here in America we were just becoming aware of a vastly different kind of war that was going to make it impossible for any of us ever to have much of a future? In the spring of 1970, I was something brand-new for my staid old Boston life insurance company. I was then their leading ecological activist. I wrote articles for my company’s internal publication about how to conserve everything, so together we might somehow manage to barely save this planet. And that April, which was fifty-four years ago now, I participated in Boston’s first Earth Day.  

Back then, we did not believe that there ever would be a year 2024. Heck, even a viable year 2000 was hardly conceivable for us. Edward and I wanted children, so we were going to have children but we full-well knew that their lives would be different from and very much less than what we would have wanted for them. My beloved had just finished his residency when he was drafted, and it was a close thing because by then the Vietnam War was winding down. He was one of the last Berry-plan physicians to be caught in the draft, which delayed our wedding by another year.

What brings all of this to mind this week is my having come across a folder of materials from that long-ago time as I was searching through some very old files. And I was struck as I went through that folder by how much what is going on now in this country must be damaging so many of the minds of today’s young people, just as was my own youthful mind distorted by Vietnam, and by the suddenly prominent ecological terrors which were pummeling us with our severely damaged future. Back then, we assumed that the ecological mess that was about to fall on all our heads would be an unavoidable apocalyptic tragedy.

I am going to lay it all out for you now. But first, please allow me this little impassioned digression. I am not taking a political side here. But having found myself briefly back in 1970 has put me again close to the Civil Rights era in the US. Which makes me forcefully realize how terrible it is for today’s young Americans to be raging antisemites now, as so many of them apparently are, to my amazement and to my disgust. Can you believe what you are seeing in the news? Lots of otherwise normal young Americans are suddenly antisemitic Nazi pigs and bullies! Even though soon they will horribly realize that never again in their lives will they be able to bear to be inside any room which contains an uncovered mirror. For them to be shouting some of the things that they are shouting at their Jewish classmates now is the precise equivalent of their shouting “Ni**er!” at black people. How can they not realize that?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. My high school and college years were the years when he and many less prominent heroes marched for and at last won racial justice. They won racial justice for every American, forevermore! How have all these college students so quickly and easily forgotten that fact? To see precisely the same racial hatred that distorted the faces of nasty racists fifty years ago now on the faces of these viciously antisemitic college students chanting ugly Hamas slogans at their Jewish classmates turns my stomach. It horrifies me. And it breaks my heart. They know not what they do!  

Okay. End of digression. What I want to talk about today, my dear ones, is prophesy, and the wisdom and balance that a little time and distance can provide. I had altogether forgotten that back in 1970, we were certain that there could be no future. Or at least, there could be no possible future in which you and I would want to rear our children. The experts had convinced us of that fact, and who were we to tell them they were wrong? I am going to give you a summary of confident predictions from some of the greatest experts of 1970, the people who truly knew their stuff, and I am going to ask you please to read these items thoughtfully. Pay special attention to the dates by which all of these calamities were certain to happen:

  • “The Great Die-Off”! “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].” “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in “the Great Die-Off.”
  • Worldwide Famine! Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
  • Air Pollution! In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, [1980] urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
  • Reduced Life Expectancy! Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued, Americans’ life expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is now 76.4 years).
  • No More Oil or Minerals! Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
  • No More Wild Animals! Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years [by 1995], somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
  • New Ice Age! Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

Even though we were told repeatedly back in 1970 that each of these calamities was absolutely unavoidable, not one of the disasters that haunted our nightmares in 1970 has ever happened. What changed our future so unexpectedly and so wonderfully? Well, a few big miracles rapidly came along. For one thing, considerably improved living conditions in the third world during the seventies and eighties reduced birth rates suddenly and dramatically worldwide. And what was then called “the green revolution” of new and better food-plant species and more advanced growing methods made for much bigger and better-quality harvests, especially of rice, as early as the mid-seventies. And that combination of sharply reduced population growth and much better and more abundant food harvests together averted the worldwide famine conditions that had been so confidently expected. A move away from dictatorships and toward more economic freedoms in some countries helped as well, as did new discoveries of oil and basic minerals that had then been thought to be in very short supply. In the early eighties, Ronald Reagan cut US income taxes substantially, and he thereby began, and Bill Clinton then fostered, what became a twenty-five-year economic boom in America that enabled this nation to spread some of its wealth to the poorer parts of the world. A very happy turn toward global warming kept creeping glaciers from taking over the northern hemisphere, and rain forest conservation efforts, and efforts to reduce air pollution worldwide each also played their respective parts. My goodness, when I was a young child, I can recall that nearly every city in this country could be spotted from a distance because it had a mushroom cloud of smog above it! You know, come to think of it, perhaps we have 1970’s Earth Day clarion calls to thank, at least in part, for many of these miracles after all.

I do think, though, that our having lived through all those strident 1970 alarms has made many of us who remember that year reluctant to worry very much whenever the next big government-touted crisis comes along. We took the coming ice age very seriously back then! But the much later advent of “global warming,” which has apparently saved us from having to open our front doors on some much later morning to find that a creeping glacier has taken over our front yards? Not so much. My generation has already been there. So we assume now that we won’t need to make extreme global-warming-inspired changes to our own lifestyles until those who fly to Davos each year on private jets for their global-warming chats take the threat of global warming seriously enough that they feel the need to start to fly commercial. And maybe we’ll just wait and begin to worry about global warming ourselves when Al Gore and Barack Obama find it necessary to put their oceanfront homes on the market.  

I asked my wonderful Thomas how we might best end this post. And he answered me with a sentence that his earlier incarnation wrote two hundred and eight years ago, almost to the day. These are wise words indeed!

“How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in April of 1816, in an extremely long letter on this same topic of doomsayers and prophets of certain catastrophes which then never see the light of day. As Jefferson points out in his letter to Adams that was written barely a decade before his and Adams’s deaths both occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he himself was always hopeful, always sanguine and cheerful about the future. As indeed he should have been. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who penned these sacred words which begin the American Declaration of Independence, and these words have well stood the test of time. Thomas Jefferson wrote these words which every college student in America should be especially keeping in mind this spring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

… Raindrops keep falling on my head,
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red.
Crying’s not for me!
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining.
Because I’m free. Nothing’s worrying me!
– Burt F. Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” (1969)

Non-material Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

There is someone walking behind you.
Turn around. Look at me.
There is someone watching your footsteps.
Turn around, look at me.

There is someone who really needs you!
Here’s my heart in my hand!
Turn around, look at me!
Understand, understand!
– Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)

How is all this further materialist scientific dithering and nonsense even possible anymore in the twenty-first century? We all have learned long since that everything is consciousness. So watching so many supposedly well-educated people battling about whether or not consciousness even actually exists at all, and what it is, or whether what they are ostensibly using to think about these matters is, you know, only after all just an illusion in some way, or an artifact produced by their material brain and somehow not real is actually hysterically funny, when you think about it. Well, you are using your mind, of course. And your mind is objectively real. But as has also been true in the field of origin-of-life research, where thanks to the brilliant origin-of-life scientist James Tour, there is no traditional matter-based scientist who seems to be able to do anything right. So also, in traditional matter-based consciousness studies, the scientific old guard has been having a rough time of late.

Okay, so it does seem to be clear even to most scientists by now that what we experience as human consciousness is at least something objectively real that we can study. But, where does consciousness come from? The notion that it springs from matter in some fashion, which is what traditional scientists still insist must be true in order for consciousness to fit their materialist paradigm, in fact makes no sense. It is a pity, really, that the only nontraditional scientists working in this field are batting for the Christian team, because one need not have a religious bias to simply be investigating these basic truths. As you will shortly see.

There is an organization called Hillfaith.org which apparently is largely political. But its scientific arm does brilliant, cutting-edge work, and their videos are extraordinary! A short while back, Hillfaith.org produced five videos which are a must-watch series for anyone who is trying to better understand consciousness. They are beautifully produced and easy to understand, and the case that they make together for how consciousness actually works is really impossible to refute:

  • Matter Does Not Produce Consciousness. Here we see in wonderful detail how impossible it would be for consciousness to be merely somehow the product of the material human brain.
  • How Consciousness and Yellow are Alike. Okay, so these folks can be playful when they want to be, and especially when they find playfulness to be useful in proving their point! And it really is impossible to explain awareness in terms of matter, and to correlate any felt experience to matter. Consciousness is not in any way reducible to matter at all.
  • Why Materialists Cannot Fully Explain Consciousness. What is monumentally complex about consciousness is here shown in a series of detailed experiments that more or less literally blow your mind, ending with one where all connection is severed between the two hemispheres of the brain, each of which separately operates the opposite side of the body. And yet the victim can move in the world almost perfectly normally, including coordinating both sides of her body in order to smoothly and safely drive a car. Think about that.
  • And Then There is Quantum Biology.  This video also blows your mind. There is something about consciousness which causes an irreducible conscious agent not created by the brain to be able to act in certain specific ways. To be frank, this video actually made my eyes cross, and I wanted to watch it a second time but couldn’t because my schedule was so tight. Maybe I will find some extra time later on to fit it in.
  • How Can Someone with Partial or No Brain Have Consciousness? This video proves pretty satisfactorily that the brain acts to receive consciousness, and it certainly does not produce it!

It will take you some time to watch all five of these videos plus the video that begins this post, but I urge you strongly to watch them all. It is important that you fully grasp the fact that every working traditional scientist of today very sadly must contend with an impossible problem. They are stuck for their entire careers trying to make something happen that never can happen. They are trying to square a circle, and to make what long ago was proven to be false become now somehow magically and eternally true, and their gatekeepers have oddly made their ability to prove that something which is impossible is now not only possible, but actually is a matter of even religious certainty the very crux of their careers. They are seeking to make matter-based foolishness not only a matter of Fact, in other words, but a matter of something that is even beyond Fact. it is a matter of flat Institutional Truth. Does it make sense to you that scientists, of all people, would persist in trying to make this nonsensical belief in materialism somehow an institutional truth for the whole field of mainstream science, and try even to bind all future scientists to it for all eternity?

I have been watching this incredible scientific materialist nonsense go on for my entire life. Because in fact, it began very early in the twentieth century. I thought surely that after a century or more had passed, someone with sufficient professional gravitas to be taken seriously would say, Hey guys, there is a rather big Oopsie going on here in science, in case you haven’t noticed it, and we had better fix it before any more whole careers are entirely wasted. But alas, still No. Albert Einstein tried to point it out, but he did it too subtly. Toward the end of his life he said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Were you aware that Einstein ever said such a thing? Nikola Tesla, however, was not subtle about it. He said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

But still, all these modern academic scientists of far less intellectual heft than those two giants continue to pointlessly muddle on. Like politicians who cannot conceive of a world in which their own careers have been wasted on a failed political theory, they rigidly enforce their old long-since-discredited materialist dogma. And so modern materialist science, droopy dinosaur that it is, still stubbornly and pointlessly lumbers on for one more year.

It truly is incredible that some of the most visionary scientists of today must by default be just a few old afterlife researchers. What Craig Hogan and I and others of our ilk have learned in the course of doing our afterlife investigations is that the only thing that in fact objectively exists is what you and I experience as consciousness. And what is consciousness? The best definition of it that I have seen has come from Thomas, my venerable spirit guide, who when asked for a definition of consciousness gave me this:

“Consciousness is an infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, governed by emotion and therefore self-aware.” Thomas also says that “Consciousness is all that independently exists.” And he tells us that “Consciousness is an aspect of the Mind of God,” and it includes all human minds.

I have read that definition over and over as I studied it with Thomas! It is clear that every word of it is important. He insists to me that all of what we think we see around us is mere illusion. It seems solid to us only because we test its solidity with a hand which is also illusory. But then, in an unguarded moment even Albert Einstein once also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Thomas tells us that at its lowest vibration, consciousness is all the ugliest emotions, like fear, anger and hatred; while at its highest vibration, Consciousness – and here we capitalize the word – is perfect Love, and it is the Godhead of our universe. Our minds are all ranged at various spots along the vibrational range of consciousness, depending upon our personal vibratory levels. And once we have learned to raise our spiritual vibrations sufficiently, we can cease to incarnate on earth ever again.

Of course, none of these are religious beliefs. They are instead certain facts that have been discerned through lengthy, careful, and objective research. We have spent our lives doing the kind of free and joyous research that all those hapless materialist sciencecritters still are not allowed to pursue. But whenever eventually mainstream scientists are at last set free, whether it happens next year or after another thousand years have passed, they all will reach precisely the same  conclusions about the universality of Consciousness that the free scientists at the Discovery Institute, Hillfaith.org, Craig Hogan, and I, among others have together reached by the banner year of 2024. Because truth always is truth, is it not?

So then, my dear ones, whenever in the distant future this whole world comes at last to know that Consciousness is the only reality, as we knew was true way back in the year 2024, please just raise a glass of something merry to us? And when you do that, only know that Craig and I will be right there with you. And, what the heck, maybe Thomas and even Jesus will be joining us as well. And we will be raising our glasses of divine ambrosia all together! And we will celebrate the fact that, at last and forevermore, this ultimate and universal truth of reality is finally and forever set free!

Oh, I’ve waited, and I’ll wait forever for you to come to me!
Look at someone who really loves you, yeah, loves you!
Turn around, look at me!
Turn around! Look at me!
– Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)

Reinventing Christianity

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Dear One, the world is waiting for the sunrise.
Every rose is covered with dew.
The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling,
And my heart is calling you.

 Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew!
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In My Heart is calling You!
– Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)

When even some secular publications are now saying that the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is the single most important event in all of human history, then perhaps we ought to reconsider whether we really should be insisting on altogether ditching the terms “Christian” and “Christianity.” I was sure that Jesus would be better off without those terms. But, is that really true? Perhaps in trying to give up all His religious designations, we might be acting too hastily. And, yes, I wince a bit as I write these words! Just the thought of holding on to terms that have been connected to so much pain in the world over the past seventeen hundred years still gives me pause. It feels almost as if we are feeling a sudden new fondness for things like swastikas perhaps, or giant statues of the brutal god Moloch, to whom they sacrificed children. But our problem is, my beloved friends, that the historical Jesus is so deeply bound up in the Christian religion that the Romans invented hundreds of years after Jesus’s bodily death and His Resurrection. And the Romans connected their new religion so tightly to Jesus’s name, and He has been thereby caught up in the religion from its earliest beginnings. Christianity as a religion is false in its dogmas, and its beliefs are mostly fear-based and false, all created to support the malevolent powers of ancient and corrupt Roman rulers long past. But Jesus and the Godhead from which He came are indisputably genuine and true, and they are based in nothing but the greatest love from ever since their own beginnings! So, what can we do with this conundrum now?

For the longest time, it seemed that we simply could separate Jesus from the Roman religion and then let that false Christianity die. And so indeed it is dying now, and it is dying of its own dead weight. According to a September 2022 Pew study, people identifying as Christians have decreased from 90% of the U.S. population in 1972 to 64% in 2020. And in the aftermath of the COVID crisis, that number now is even lower. Those who today religiously identify as “nones” comprise roughly 30% of the U.S. population. But Christianity had made Jesus so completely its symbol from its inception that it is becoming ever-increasingly clear to us that Jesus has all along been even bigger in people’s minds than the religion itself ever could have been.

Just in the past couple of decades, as Christianity has continued to fade, Jesus has begun to do on His own schedule what always was going to be essential if He was not going to go down with the foundering Christian ship. Jesus’s plan has for a long time been to create an individual image for Himself in modern people’s minds with a couple of recent movies, and with “The Chosen” TV show, and also with the college-based revivals that have been happening at some southern schools during these recent springs. All of this has long been planned and is being orchestrated by Jesus Himself. Lately Thomas has made it clear to me that Jesus has had to create a separate personal image, and one that places Him well off the crucifix and active and seeming to be modernly relevant. He needed to give us this new Jesus for today, or Jesus as an image was going to die in people’s minds in the same way that the religion has long been dying. And Jesus’s new image has been developing right on schedule!

Of course, hearing from Thomas that Jesus has long been working on this very problem is a great relief to me. More and more now, we are regularly seeing figures of a smiling or a laughing Jesus, or a friendly-seeming guy who looks like Jesus turning up on TV, in billboard ads, or wherever. You and I are becoming used to seeing that. Thomas tells me that all of this is just what is supposed to be happening now. So I am trying very hard to let go of this awful sense of personal responsibility to take care of Jesus that I have been feeling. Yes, Jesus does not possess a material body, so He does to some extent need us to be His surrogate hands and His voice on earth. But He has something huge that you and I can only dream of having! Jesus has the ability to influence people’s minds and hearts pretty majorly, and clearly He is doing that now, speaking internally to so many people and influencing them. So, No, you and I do not have to do this work for Him without His help. 

Jesus is God. Or rather, perhaps we ought to more aptly say that Jesus is an aspect of God. His mind is infinitely powerful. Even our own vast, eternal minds are far more powerful than are these very limited earth-minds that we use while we are here on earth, these minds which are designed just for spiritual learning, and really are not useful for much else. But we really cannot begin to grasp the vast mental complexity to which our beloved Jesus has such ready access. 

I can recall two summers ago when I was visiting Jesus with Thomas almost nightly, and I was trying to understand everything that Jesus wanted us to include on His new website. Like a fool, I was pretty star-struck and completely intimidated, shyly asking Jesus questions and trying to even think of what else to ask and what to say to Him, and I realize now that was partly because whenever you talk with Jesus in person, you have to get used to the fact that His mind is always multi-tasking, so He is paying full attention to you, but He also seems to be somewhat distracted. I didn’t realize what was going on at the time, but Thomas has recently explained it to me. And it does make sense. Think about it. How many people on earth are praying to Jesus at any given moment? Omigod, how much must Jesus have to be thinking about at once? And yet, He can do that while He also carries on a conversation, and in fact even many conversations, all at the same time. Thomas tells me that when you and I are back in our vast, eternal minds, we will to a lesser extent also be able to think of several things at once while we are carrying on multiple conversations.

So it is time for you and me to stop fretting about what is going on with Jesus on earth as a matter of our own conjectures and our very deepest fears. For a very long time, and indeed for most of my life since college as I have watched what I have known ever since then would be inevitable, I have fretted about how we might save our much-beloved Jesus from going down with the Christian ship.  Because obviously Jesus has seen the danger, too, and for even much longer than you and I have seen it.

Silly, silly me. I have always reckoned without the fact that Jesus did, you know, actually rise from the dead when, very long ago, He rose from the dead! And He has been a lot smarter about this than I have been, with my limited earth-mind’s narrow and fear-based thinking. So, with my Thomas’s loving counseling, I have been of late enjoying what has felt like a long and luxurious exhale of relief. Jesus really has got this! You and I do not have to worry. When Jesus is influencing secular publications to see His death and resurrection as a crucially important secular event, and also when He even has been careful over the past two thousand years to preserve His Shroud and His burial facecloth, and even including the miraculous image on the Shroud which was created using energy equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on earth put together in a single miraculous discharge, we know that Jesus has been thinking far ahead toward this crucial moment in time. Now someone even has been influenced by Jesus’s mind to offer a million-dollar prize to the first person who can duplicate the image on the Shroud of Turin, and thereby demonstrate (if possible) how it was produced. And I wish those contestants good luck with that! As for me, after all my years of doing afterlife research, I am a resolute skeptic about everything. And I have found that, very sad to say, earthly life hands us exceedingly few genuine miracles. I have examined the Shroud studies thoroughly, however. And I now consider the Shroud of Turin to be one of the few true earthly miracles.

So, what does all of this suggest about the future of Christianity as we all move on from here? I think that what we are going to be left with as all of the shorter-term pain settles out is Jesus’s original first-century movement exclusively. I cannot see how anything of Constantine’s invented third-century Christianity can survive. The problem is that Constantine’s Christianity, like every religion that ever was invented, is a fly in amber. It is a creature only of its own time and place, which was seventeen hundred years ago. So it is irrevocably long dead now, and preserved just as it was when it was first created by human beings, but with nothing of value to offer to us today. The Pew studies cited above abundantly confirm that to be true.  

An excellent article by a former Evangelical talks about the kinds of reasons why sincere Christians are leaving the Roman Christian faith in such numbers, and he visualizes it in terms of three buckets. He claims that the reasons that lapsed Christians are giving for leaving Christianity are quite broad and varied. But they all can be fitted into one or more of these three buckets:

  • Personal Harm. This lay Christian worker and his wife had come to a place in their marriage where they felt that they needed to go their separate ways, but even an amicable divorce was never to be granted to members of a church of their denomination. So rather than love and support as they did what they felt that they had to do, their former friends in the faith offered to them only condemnation, shame and rejection.
  • Institutional Dissatisfaction. It is no wonder that so many people are leaving the churches, when narrow conformity is demanded to very old rules which too often make no actual sense, and which are unloving and harmful, in particular the exclusion of the gay and lesbian community. Here again, where there should be love and forgiveness and support, there is only rigid condemnation for those who cannot toe the strict and antiquated religious line.
  • Intellectual Congruence. Every form of modern Christianity still holds to the antiquated and preposterous notion that God demands that the faithful be perfectly forgiving, and yet God cannot forgive us for Adam’s sin, and let alone for our own sins, unless God first gets to watch God’s only Son die horribly on the cross as a perfect human sacrifice. Or, how else would you state that basic Roman Christian dogma? Some parishioners, too, are bothered by Christianity’s direct adherence to unscientific principles of creationism and such, which make the religion seem to be completely out of touch with modern reality.

 I think this fellow pretty much nails what is causing Roman Christianity’s decline. The religion is frozen and dead in the ancient past rather than living and spiritually growing, and there is no practical cure for its problems. What we are witnessing is a necessary and natural death by reason of old age. But something much better can follow it.

When I was meeting with Jesus two summers ago, He told me that He had come to earth to free humankind from religions altogether. He told me then that every religion is a human invention, an old way for people to seek to relate to the eternal God, which is why religions and their human-made traditions do nothing more than to come between us and God. Without the human-made restrictions of religions in the way, people will be free to develop a direct and person spiritual relationship with God, Who is Spirit. So that is to be the future Way of Jesus, which in the end will be the only Christianity that will still be in existence. It is the Christianity that Thomas expresses in The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. So I do now, yes, understand that there will indeed be a Christianity going forward. But it will not be the Romans’ Christianity. It will be the Christianity that Jesus taught.

 Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew.
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In My Heart is calling You!
– Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)

Growing Spiritually

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with me.
Let There Be Peace on Earth,
The peace that was meant to be.

With God as our Father,
Brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother
In perfect harmony.

 Let peace begin with me.
Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take,
Let this be my solemn vow!
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Thirteen years ago, Thomas put it into my mind that I should begin to try to grow spiritually. After all, there I was telling everyone else that using the teaching of Jesus to grow spiritually can work very well. I had just written and published The Fun of Dying, and I was speaking about the book in bookstores and in Unity churches. Then someone in a bookstore in California asked me during a question period following one of those speeches whether the teachings of Jesus actually can be used to help us to grow spiritually. And I said that, yes, of course they can, and very well indeed! But then as I thought about it afterward, I realized that this was all still just a theory, for heaven’s sake. I knew how it was supposed to work. But it was high time that I tried it all out on myself.

 What I didn’t understand at the time, because Thomas had not yet come out to me in person, was that this whole spiritual growth project was actually all my Thomas’s idea. I did not yet even know back then how reality is constructed. I was only just beginning to become aware of all of that. I had only recently read Craig Hogan’s wonderful, seminal book, Your Eternal Self, but I was still in what I think of now as my own spiritual infancy. Nevertheless, I had been so taken with Craig’s book that I had invited him to Austin to speak in my home Unity church. That was when I first actually met him! And when you have read the Bible repeatedly, dozens of times and for most of your life, you develop the conviction that Jesus really ought to be taken seriously. So in the summer of 2011, and with the prodding of the spirit guide that I had not yet met, I decided that I would put the teachings of Jesus into practice. And with Thomas’s behind-the-scenes prompting as to methods and protocols, I developed my first serious gratitude-forgiveness-and-love program. And I was my own first test-subject.

To give you a bit of background, I was in fact a pretty good candidate to be our guinea pig for this spiritual-growth developmental project. For my entire life before 2011, you would not have liked me very much. I was well-meaning, but I was a spoiled prima donna with a hair-trigger temper. You probably know the type. And I was a lethally combative driver! If you ever cut me off in traffic, you had an immediate war on your hands. The worst thing I can now recall doing, and I blush to think of it even four decades later, was when someone cut right in front of me on a highway at speed, and he nearly killed us both just because he needed to make his exit. He made me so angry that I followed him off, and I rode his bumper until, to get rid of me, he had to pull into a police station parking lot that he had already driven past once. That was incredibly stupid of me! If he had been a different sort of man, he could already have pulled a gun and killed me on the spot. But you can see that I really needed to do this spiritual work, and pretty badly! So then for five weeks or so in the summer of 2011, I worked very hard at growing spiritually, using just the Gospel teachings of Jesus and my guide’s lesson-plan.

Then one day later that summer, I had a lunch date with a unity minister, and while I was driving there, someone cut me off at speed so he could make his exit. And… nothing. This time, it didn’t bother me at all. As I waited for my lunch date in our restaurant, I thought about what just had happened to me, and with considerable increasing wonder. All I could think was that it was as if for my whole previous life, I had had levers on the outside of me that people could easily fiddle with, and that would make me crazy. And now suddenly, all those levers had been disconnected on the inside, somehow. People still could fiddle with them, and I was aware of their doing that. But I was in control now. I didn’t care. It was amazing! I had not been paying attention, but I think in retrospect that it had taken only at most maybe six weeks of my spiritual work with Jesus to make this amazing change in me. And that was thirteen years ago. The change has been permanent and complete. And so fast! I cannot recall in the past thirteen years actually ever once being angry, fearful, or  anything but peaceful and happy. I have never once since the spring of 2011 been the selfish, unspiritual and out of control prima donna that I was for my whole previous life before 2011. And I didn’t like that person, either.   

Of course, I should have thought about teaching this amazing and magical spiritual process to others much sooner than this. But I didn’t realize that it would be permanent! And it just seems so natural to me now. But of course, it really is natural. It is who you and I were meant to be, who we are, and what our whole lives on earth are designed to be about. Our problem is that the world around us now is in every way so abnormal! So in order for us to adopt the kind of spiritual life that will empower us to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime, we do have to adopt a lifestyle that is altogether wrenchingly different from the kind of life that most of us are in fact now living. I fell into this more spiritual way of living just naturally, by the fall of 2011. Doing this felt right. It felt necessary. And frankly, I realize as I look back now that all of it was happening by Thomas’s careful guidance. Even before he actually came out to me in February of 2015, he had altogether taken over my life.

So, better late than not at all. When I came across a course last fall in how to design and then deliver an online course, I enrolled eagerly, and then from January of 2024 through the end of last week, what we have been calling “Wednesday with Jesus” has been meeting on the past twelve Wednesday evenings.Thirty beautiful people living all over the world have been gathering around a very large Zoom table to learn from Jesus how to lift their personal vibrations enough to make this their last necessary earth-lifetime.

And, oh my god, I cannot tell you how amazingly well this has worked in just twelve weeks! The people participating in Wednesday with Jesus are all subscribers to my blog post who simply responded by email when I said in a blog post shortly before Christmas, “My dear ones, who would like to try taking a course on making this your last necessary earth-lifetime?” They are dear and wonderful friends already, which has probably tainted the sample. But, nevertheless.

All of this felt as if it was landing on us from out of nowhere, to be frank. I still didn’t really know all that much about how to deliver a course! But Thomas did. When I set out rather stumblingly to design twelve weeks of classes, he drew out those twelve classes for us in one smooth shot. I looked at it and thought, wow, did I do that? Well, no, I quickly realized. He did. And he has been having a lot of fun with this. My Thomas seldom plays at all, so to see my grave friend kicking up his heels with this, even just a little bit, makes me happy.  

Thomas quickly let me know that he had my back with this course, so I could relax. All of it was coming from him as Jesus’s servant. And he was really having fun with it! He likes the people taking the course, and he channeled the whole twelve-step lesson plan to me as quickly as my fingers could fly, and then every Monday for the whole twelve weeks of Wednesdays to follow, he let me know how he wanted me to flesh out every one of those Wednesday lessons with Jesus’s Gospel words, and with spoken lessons. No stress on me, no worries at all, and Thomas’s help arrived so dependably. And as I began to see the striking spiritual improvements almost weekly in so many of our class members’ lives, I relaxed.   

To begin our course, Thomas first talked about what spiritual growth actually is, and how our limited earth-minds are designed for rapid spiritual learning. My goodness, I never would have thought of doing that! But he thought of it all. And it was Thomas who insisted that we must begin each lesson with a prayer to invoke Jesus, which then of course made Jesus smile, standing there to my right since Thomas is always to my left, and sometimes Jesus even laughed a little at my formal stuffiness. Of course, I already knew that Jesus would be right here with us! He tells us that whenever a few of us are gathered in His name, He is with them. So then I would blush and get a little silly, and everyone would relax. I began to get private emails from students between weekly classes as they shared their breakthroughs with me, and I was thrilled for them. Omigosh, this was working for them, just as almost a decade and a half ago it had worked so well for me!

But three months and twelve meetings is not much time in which to solidify a whole new approach to life. Many of those participating in this class began to ask for a “Wednesday with Jesus Level #2”, and now that is about to begin. So far, about two-thirds of the members of the first-level class are choosing to continue to the second level together. They have already learned how to begin to control their own minds to such a remarkable degree!   

Why is this so important? It is important not only because we each really do have the power to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime, and we can do it pretty easily. But also because we now understand that each of us is part of the one great Consciousness which is the only reality. And our personal power to influence that reality for good or for ill is extraordinary:

  • Each one of us who definitively begins the process of raising our own spiritual vibration begins a benign process that can be permanent for us. Think of it as a kind of ratcheting upward. If we never then allow ourself to fall back into any of our old habits, which is what our second phase of Wednesday with Jesus will primarily be about, this simple reinforcement of our spiritual spiral so it continues ever upward becomes permanent. For me, about eighteen months after I began my own process, I felt altogether transformed. It was a miracle. And when I met Thomas in 2015, I asked him if I had elevated myself enough to make this my last necessary earth-lifetime (which would mean that I had reached the upper fifth level). He told me that, yes indeed I had. But I already knew by then that was probably true.
  • Not only can we easily elevate ourselves to the point where we will never need to incarnate again, but since we are all part of the same Consciousness, we also can minutely raise the consciousness of every other person on earth! Do you want to bring permanent peace to the Middle East, to the Ukraine, and to every other place on earth? Then first bring peace to yourself! Each person who raises his or her personal vibration using the spiritual teachings of Jesus as this first class has just done so successfully in only three months’ time, and who then maintains his or her spiritual growth, can not only make this your last necessary earth-lifetime. You also can minutely raise the spiritual vibration of everyone else on earth. And if enough of us do this, we in fact do have the power to raise the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind.

Now peace on earth really can begin with you! “Thursday with Jesus” first-level classes are planned to begin early in May, and to run for one hour per week for twelve weeks. If that timing is inconvenient for you, the lessons will be recorded, and there will be make-up times and individual counseling. When I tell you that you can easily make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, I mean that. It doesn’t take years of hard work and slogging. It takes only gratitude, forgiveness and love, and it takes just weeks to begin it. And when I tell you that this is the only way that you and I ever can turn this world around, in fact, this is the only way that you and I can play that kind of role in history. But isn’t it wonderful that there is something that you and I really can begin to do that matters? If you want to learn more, please send me an email at info@robertagrimes.com.  

My beloved friends, now is when it begins.  

Let peace begin with me.
Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take,
Let this be my solemn vow!

To take each moment and live
Each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth,
And let it begin with me!
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Jesus Lives!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
– John Newton (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1772)

We have witnessed a genuine miracle. And the fact that the miracle happened two thousand years ago and was planned as a personal gift to humankind, and we can see now how it was accomplished, we can peek behind the curtain and watch it as it happened makes that miracle even more wonderful. It was, in fact, a whole set of miracles, the last of which is the fact that Jesus has managed to preserve for us over the past two thousand years sufficient evidence of His life, death, and resurrection that even all these many years later we still can know with certainty that it actually did happen. The fact that we have the Shroud of Turin, and we now can document its miraculous nature tells us monumentally wondrous things about the extraordinary nature of Jesus as well.

Two years ago, I also experienced my own miracle. My spirit guide, Thomas, took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane because we were about to work together on creating a website for Him (although I didn’t know anything about this at the time). Jesus told me during that first visit that He wants the world to have His genuine backstory now, to replace all the religious myth-making. And He especially wants us to know that six thousand years ago, He was just a man in a human body who was working to perfect Himself spiritually, just as you and I are working, each toward our own spiritual perfection. Jesus told me that once He had perfected Himself and achieved the level of the Godhead, He was so troubled to see how difficult the struggle for perfection still remains for most people living on earth, especially since they still receive no guidance at all about why they are born on earth or how they might best achieve spiritual growth. Even now, most people continue to pointlessly drudge through lifetime after lifetime on earth, while making little or no spiritual progress.

So the entity who was later to be born as Jesus persuaded the Powers to allow Him to be born again on earth, directly from out of the Godhead. This sort of Godhead-level birth of a perfected being had never previously been attempted. And Jesus did not do it just so He could die for our sins. That bogus sin-offering concept was an old Hebrew religious idea, and entirely unnecessary now, since as Jesus Himself quite pointedly tells us, God never judges anyone (see JN 5:20-23). And for the record, Jesus doesn’t judge us either, as He tells us at JN 12:45-47. Jesus was born to teach us that we undertake lifetimes on earth in order to raise our own spiritual vibrations, and also to raise the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind, which He calls bringing the kingdom of God on earth (see e.g. LK 8:1, 9:2, 9:11). And Jesus also was born to teach us how to grow spiritually so rapidly that we can end the cycle of repeated rebirths and make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. So that was the reason for Jesus’s three years of teaching! His teachings are not just the make-nice platitudes that most people have long considered them to be. Instead, they are a beautiful spiritual lesson-plan so efficient that they can transform your life within months.  

The whole idea that Jesus had to die to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins, which modern Christians call “penal substitutionary atonement,” is not based in anything that Jesus said. Indeed, that Christian religious idea directly contradicts the truths that Jesus shares with us in the Gospels. And it is frankly altogether repellent. Try asking yourself which of your own beloved children you would most enjoy watching being horribly murdered so you can forgive the rest of your children for messing up your living room. God insists that you and I must forgive every wrong ever done to us, when at the same time we are told by our religion that the God that we worship is so unforgiving? Jesus tells us to forgive “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven times” (MT 18:22). So apparently God insists that you and I must forgive, while at the same time God demands that we participate in the sacrifice of His own Son to Himself, or else God refuses to forgive us? This bogus idea that God is unable to forgive unless God first gets to watch His Son being murdered is such a terrible insult to the genuine God, and a complete humiliation of Jesus!

But if Jesus didn’t have to die as a sin-sacrifice, then why did He go to the cross on Good Friday? And was He still somehow doing it for us? Jesus’s reason for dying on the cross is something else that He explained to me on that amazing night when I first met Him in the astral plane two years ago. He told me that His death on the cross had not been any part of His original life-plan, but His plan instead had been that He would simply walk away from His companions when His teaching work on earth was done, and He would be subsumed back into the highest levels of reality. But the one thing that was severely vexing Him while He was on earth was that, try as He might, He never could convince most people that their lives were going to be eternal. After all, they knew better! The custom of the day was to lay dead bodies out in caves for several years to decay away, and then when there was nothing left of them but bones, their mourners would collect those bones into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, and then store the filled ossuaries marked with people’s names and re-use the caves. Everyone knew that people died and decayed away! No matter what Jesus said, He could not convince them otherwise.

So Jesus decided to give every one of us, both those alive back then and all the rest of us until the end of time, a demonstration that human life really is eternal. He told me on that night two years ago that He wasn’t even sure that He would be able to revive and re-use His body after it was crucified, but He had been experimenting with reviving small dead animals with some success. He could bring dead animals alive again after they had died, although not for long. Still, He was determined to try this. He said that He was protected during His lifetime as Jesus by invisible archangels, so He had to order His archangel guards to stand down in order for Him to even be arrested. (I found these little details so fascinating!) He told me that He never managed to get the Godhead’s agreement to this change in His life plan because it seemed to be a humiliation of an Emissary from  God, and the thought of that was insupportable. But once it was clear that Jesus was determined to do it anyway, with or without God’s permission, He did at least receive God’s promise that if He went through with it, He would die on the cross well before sunset on Friday. He would therefore (hopefully) die with unbroken and still usable legs, since it was routine for the Roman guards to go around and break the legs of people on crosses who were still alive when the sun was setting as the Saturday Sabbath arrived at sundown. Without usable legs, they would no longer be able to push up and breathe, and they would soon die of asphyxiation.  

Who really is Jesus? When my Thomas first came out to me in 2015, the first thing I asked him was whether Jesus really came to us as the Son of God, or whether He was only a wise prophet. Thomas told me that Jesus is much more even than just the Son of God. He said that Jesus entered that lifetime from the highest aspect of the Godhead. So since the evidence suggests, and both Thomas and our regular Seek Reality guest Mikey Morgan together have confirmed to us, that the God of this reality is a Collective of Perfected Beings, they are telling us that God literally walked the earth in the Person of the historical Jesus. Indeed, Jesus Himself suggests His own divinity in the Gospels, although those who heard Him speak and then passed His words down orally for a couple of generations before those words were written down may not have fully understood what He was saying. He would say things like, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). Jesus lived on earth in a fairly primitive time and place. It is important that we always keep that in mind! The fact that so few of Jesus’s listeners were able to grasp the reality that God had incarnated on earth in the Person of Jesus should not much surprise us.

I began researching death and the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies in an effort to understand my childhood experiences of light. It took me more than a decade to really understand that many hundreds of perfectly consistent communications from people that we used to think were dead, received on two continents over nearly a century, did make it pretty much statistically impossible for the afterlife that they all talked about so consistently not to be real. And although I was very familiar with the Gospels, and in the end quite frustrated about the fact that Christians mostly ignored Jesus’s teachings, it was only late in the nineties that I realized that the dead were actually confirming what Jesus had said when He was on earth, and in detail. That was when I was at last able to abandon the Christian religion altogether, and to give my whole heart to Jesus alone. 

But being confident that Jesus is a genuine historical figure, and understanding that He came to us as God on earth, is still a far cry from believing that His actual burial shroud might still exist. And for a long time, I doubted the claim that the burial shroud and sudarium (face-covering) of Jesus are with us to this day. But on these matters, I am a skeptic no longer. As was true of all that afterlife evidence, and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels that I have researched so diligently, the modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and it is irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

  • Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. It is of a weave in common use at that time, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
  • The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
  • The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s reported injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
  • The Shroud carries an image of a man. That image is only smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed. There is no image on the Sudarium, but still those smudges on the Shroud can be seen. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532 and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
  • The image on the Shroud turns out to be a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
  • No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it doesn’t penetrate at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood had dried.
  • Something to think about… Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge.

Jesus’s reanimated body was not made fully alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying, and those who knew Jesus did not readily recognize Him wearing that rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile now that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could fully re-inhabit and re-animate the body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and He could use it to demonstrate His own survival; then after perhaps a day or two, He apparently cast it away, and He used an astral body from then on until He ascended, some forty days later. That astral body was why He could so easily appear inside the enclosed and fortified room where His disciples had hidden themselves (see JN 20:19-20). And having created mimic wounds in His astral body, He invited doubting Thomas to probe those wounds and satisfy himself that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then He was tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists to this day, and laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy from it that was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on the earth generated at once. He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, that human life is indeed eternal and none of us will ever die.

One of the criminals who were hanged there was saying,
“ Save Yourself and us!” The other was saying,
“Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you,
today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:39-43)

 

Jesus’s Lost Years

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on through the light,
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937)

One question about which there is much confusion is how Jesus might have spent what are called His “lost years.” After He was briefly left behind at the Temple in Jerusalem by His parents at the age of twelve, so they had to go back and fetch Him (see LK 43-50), there is nothing in the Biblical Gospels about what Jesus was doing with His life until much later, when He was baptized by John the Baptist at the age of thirty and He then began His public life. So, what was Jesus doing during those eighteen early years of his life? 

This has always been a puzzle. The notion that He might simply have been growing up, living as a carpenter during His teens and twenties, caring for His mother and His younger siblings, assisting His carpenter father, enjoying His friends and living His life, is impossible for most people to contemplate. So the theory has grown that He must have been traveling to the Far East and learning the wisdom of the ancient sages of that part of the world. Yes! That’s the ticket! A book is currently being written comparing Jesus’s teachings with the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching,  which dates to the late fourth century BCE. Some people firmly believe that Jesus journeyed to India, to Tibet, and perhaps even to China, and He studied under various sages along the way, so His teachings surely incorporate wisdom that He learned on those distant travels.

Let’s pause and consider this idea for a moment. Jesus spoke Aramaic. There is no Gospel evidence that He was fluent in other languages. Of course, He also could read the ancient Hebrew scrolls, and there is evidence that He had a good Hebrew religious education, but that is the whole extent of His literacy. So, how did Jesus communicate with people in India and Tibet and even perhaps in China, and with those who spoke all the many different languages that He would have encountered in the course of His long journey to the east, and then His similar journey back toward home? It Is more than two thousand, eight hundred miles from Israel to India. And if Jesus went as far as China, that would have been almost four thousand miles, and there are some pretty big mountains in the way. And how did he go? By camel? On foot? Jesus was poor. How did He purchase and transport provisions? Because it is hard to imagine what He might have managed to find to consistently eat on a journey like that, and never mind how He could have afforded to transport Himself.

And did He go all that way alone? I find that idea to be inconceivable. Jesus was always surrounded by companions, and especially as He went through the wild tribal lands of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, a man alone who didn’t speak the local language would have been slaughtered without a thought. And my dear ones, there is frankly no other way to get to India and China from Israel than through those hostile areas. All I can think is that Jesus has to have made such a trip as part of a trade caravan, if indeed He made it at all. But that would have cost quite a lot of money. Why He did it, without knowing what He might have encountered along the way, and what He could have hoped to find at journey’s end that would have been worthy of such a tremendous effort, and then how He might have calculated His odds of ever making it back home again, and also why He later never mentioned having undertaken such a long journey, are all questions which seem to demand some answers that are never even whispered about in the Gospels.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This is Jesus we are talking about here! He could probably speak every language on earth, and he could teleport himself right over the Himalayas. You see no problems for our Jesus at all. But, yes, this is Jesus we are talking about. And there is no Biblical evidence whatsoever that He ever spoke any other language, or used any magical powers at all in His lifetime as Jesus. No smiting enemies dead with a touch. No teleportation, either. In fact, whenever Jesus healed anyone, He always made a point of using the faith of the person being healed to effect the healing (see, e.g. MT 9:28; LK 8:50). There were no companions around Him in the Gospels who ever gave any evidence at all that they had traveled with him to exotic climes, and no turbaned or otherwise exotic fellows who seemed to have returned with him as trophies of His visits to far distant places.

There is no Gospel evidence at all that Jesus ever traveled beyond the bounds of what is now modern Israel. None whatsoever. Everything that Jesus taught was knowledge that He brought to earth from the Father. We have no reason to believe otherwise.

And in fact, there is a much better explanation for the so-called “lost years” of Jesus. While there is no evidence for the travels-to-the-east theory, and there is considerable evidence against it, this new theory so neatly fits so many details of the life of Jesus that until now were oddly inexplicable, from the fact that apparently He didn’t marry in His teens, as every other good Jewish boy would have done, to the oddity that His ministry didn’t begin until He reached the ancient age of thirty, that frankly I don’t know why it wasn’t noticed much sooner. I have to think that scholarly squeamishness about the word “slave” was the main reason why no one has raised this possibility until now.

I first learned of this alternative explanation during the summer before last. I was working on researching materials for Jesus’s website at the time, and meeting with Jesus in the astral plane on many nights to discuss what I was finding, So I brought this question up to Him during one of the almost nightly meetings that I was having with Him. “Is it possible that You were born into slavery?” I asked Him. And He just smiled His enigmatic half-smile. He wouldn’t give me a yes-or-no answer, but that is just the way He is. Jesus really won’t answer personal questions. So I researched the idea further, and the more I researched it, the more perfectly all the details seemed to fit.

I first blogged about this possibility last fall. And rather than asking you to follow a link, I will give you the key points here again. Let’s look together at the facts: 

  • Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. For most of those held in bondage then, it was not even a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman or a slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time, and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how slaves were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
  • Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty.
  • If Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and also why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty. He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all His so-called “lost years.” And even though Jesus may have been Joseph’s bondsman, it is clear that Joseph treated Him as His eldest son and gave Him a good religious education. Joseph received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’s impending birth, and he protected Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
  • A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
  • Joseph may never have officially married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
  • Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry, and for calling Himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy. And his home-folks immediately try to throw Him off a cliff. Huh? Here it is:

14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

20 And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. 21 Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” 23 And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. 30 But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30).

This reaction of Jesus’s childhood neighbors may be the greatest “tell” of them all. A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely not a local boy who had been freeborn!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that you and I know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His life on earth. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to a very much better understanding of humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the very least of these (see MT 25:44-46)?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery, in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He became thirty years old. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been just a coincidence.

So I have come to accept the likelihood that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, a bondsman, and He did so by strategic choice, so he could better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. He also did it by His personal choice. The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He also was going to be a slave Himself. Remember that Jesus has lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

But of course, my dear ones, it doesn’t matter. You can believe this new wrinkle about Jesus or not, as you like. One thing is for certain, though. Jesus  did not travel to the far east during His “lost years”. Thomas has helped me to work through and accept that fact. He tells me that Jesus spent those years closely studying people and further refining what He was going to be teaching during His coming ministry, and whether He did this as Joseph’s bondsman or as a yeoman carpenter in Joseph’s shop really doesn’t make any difference. But the more I have lived with this slavery theory, the more I have come to rather like the idea. Whoever were the least of those around Him, we know that our so dearly beloved Jesus would always have been right there with them, and eager to share His closer walk with them.

When my way grows dreary,
Precious Lord, lead me near.
When my life is almost gone,
At the river I will stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand.
Take my hand, precious Lord,
And lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand Precious Lord” (1937

What About Evil?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea.
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights evr’y star that makes the darkness bright!
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night!

He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Two emailed questions that people ask me more often than any others are whether or not there is a devil, and whether or not there is a hell. And I generally answer these questions by saying that while of course there is no fiery hell, there is indeed an outer darkness, which is the lowest afterlife level. But God never puts us there. No, we ourselves are the only ones who can ever put ourselves into the outer darkness if we do something in our lives for which we have trouble forgiving ourselves when we experience it during our post-death life review. So learning self-forgiveness while we are alive is an especially important task! And as for the devil, well, he might exist, but since he has no power at all, you can ignore him. But the follow-up emails that I sometimes get for these answers suggest that for many people, my responses have missed their mark. What lots of people really want to know in answer to their questions about hell and the devil is whether there is some secret truth that I can give them that will make all their deepest childhood terrors go away forevermore. By some miracle, is there somewhere a very powerful and deeply comforting complete answer?

 Well, yes, I think that there actually is. But delivering it will take longer than it takes to give them a quickly-written and emailed response.

By now, most regular readers here understand that the only thing that actually exists is what we experience as consciousness. And consciousness is an energy-like and highly emotional potentiality that exists in a deep range of vibrations, from very high and rapid to very low and slow. Consciousness is alive in the sense that your mind is alive, and at its highest vibration it is perfect love. At its lowest vibration it is fear, anger, hatred, and all the other unpleasant emotions. At its highest vibration, consciousness is infinitely powerful. Consciousness at its highest vibration is God.

At its lowest vibration, however, consciousness has no power at all. We are talking about all of reality, now – the earth and all the galaxies – and as amazing as this sounds, emotion-based and timeless consciousness is all that there is, all that there ever was, and all that there ever is going to be. It is very important that you first get your mind around this central fact of our existence. Before we talk about anything else, it is essential that you understand that your mind and my mind and every other human mind all are part together of this one great Mind. We all live rather cozily as part of the illusion that you might fondly think of as the Mind of God; and frankly, if you keep that fact always in mind, it dispels a lot of your fears right off the bat! Before we move on to talk about hell and the devil, please read these two paragraphs about consciousness again thoughtfully, one more time.

 So, I think that we can largely dispense with hell as an issue. The only sort-of version of a “hell” that actually exists is that awful lowest afterlife level which is cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting. It’s what Jesus called “the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” (see MT 8:12, MT 22:13, and MT 25:30).  And since we are the only ones who ever can condemn ourselves to  the outer darkness, and we do that only if we fail to forgive ourselves for something that we have done in life, then for us simply to learn self-forgiveness while we are alive is our complete and fail-safe solution to that worry.

Please note that every Gospel mention by Jesus of “Gehenna” is not a reference to hell either, but rather it is just a mention of the valley outside Jerusalem where trash was often burned. Jesus talks about Gehenna in the Gospels several times, and early Biblical translators often interpreted that word as “hell”; but that, plus Biblical translators’ misunderstanding of the outer darkness, is why some scholars now say that Jesus talked about hell more often than anyone else did. Which certainly is not true! Please note, too, that some other mentions of hell as a fiery place of punishment that appear to come from Jesus were coming from councilors who were working for the Roman Emperor Constantine at First Nicaea in 325, who were creating for him his new religion. And they appear to have been eager to find or to introduce fear into this new religion which was being created as a fear-based means of control. This earth is a place for learning and spiritual growth above all! And for us instead to be condemned by God to burn in hell forevermore for even trivial mistakes made in the course of our efforts to learn and grow spiritually would be nonsensical. So I feel comfortable in assuring you that, no indeed, there is no fiery hell, and our genuine God of perfect love certainly never would condemn us to it in any event.

A brief mention ought also to be made of the fact that some version of hell does rarely turn up in near-death experiences (NDEs). It has been estimated that about one in seven NDEs are negative or even hellish, but that doesn’t matter since NDEs are merely out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in the nature of dreams which are managed for us by our own spirit guides. NDE experiencers never go to the actual afterlife, and neither do they ever go to any actual hell.  

Okay then, so what about the devil? Here the answer is more complicated. I devoutly wish the truth were otherwise, but in fact there are indeed a whole variety of invisible “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy  beasties and things that go bump in the night,” as the Bible and the old Scottish prayer together insist to us that indeed there are. These nasty guys were terrified of Jesus, so He had considerable dealings with them, and probably all of us have at least some dealings with them in the course of our lives without being much aware of it. There likely also is an actual devil, or a Satan if you prefer to use that name. And many of these critters can trouble your life if you allow that to happen. But you should not be afraid of any of them, and that includes even the devil itself. To be afraid of them gives them power over you, and in fact your fear is the only pitiful little bit of power that they ever have. I have never set out to study demonish beings. But I have encountered information about them in my travels. Here, briefly, is a list of the most common kinds of evil discarnate entities:

  • The Devil. There probably is one or more of these. I know very little about devils or their history, and that is the way things will remain. I urge you not to show any curiosity about the devil or devils, since even to think about the devil very much can attract its energies to you. But the devil does show up in the Biblical Gospels interacting with Jesus (see MT 4). His role there was to tempt Jesus with the world’s riches, of course without success.
  • Demons. There are lesser negative entities that are not even fully-formed beings as such, so they need to possess the bodies of susceptible beings in order to have any real existence. They seem to exist in small groups, and they go around causing trouble. People have spiritual auras, and as long as we maintain our auras intact, they protect us from possession by demons; but becoming very drunk or very high on drugs or very ill can damage our auras. You will recall the demons that Jesus cast into the herd of swine (MT 8:30-32).
  • Shadow Men. No kidding, the most evil entities of all are so powerless that they have to lurk in closets and jump out and scare little children because they feed on fear. (And yes, such beings really do exist.) If there is just a bit of light in the room to serve as a night-light, these things have no power at all. So all babies and little children should be given night-lights, and they should never be left to cry in the dark because without the protection of night-lights in babies’ bedrooms these guys will latch on to certain little ones in childhood, and then will plague them even as adults unless their victims always sleep with a light on.
  • Deceased Addicts. People who die while they are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or sex will often refuse to transition, but will instead hang around alleys, bars, or wherever they mistakenly think that they can get their fix of what they still are craving. My own father was an alcoholic until he quit cold-turkey when I was eleven, and he had a possessing alcoholic spirit, or perhaps several such spirits, who gave an odd greenish caste to his eyes. His possessors only left him once he had conquered his own addiction. Anyone who gets very drunk in a bar, or who shoots up in a place where others have gotten high, or who participates in orgies where others also have engaged in group sex is going to shred his or her protective aura briefly, and will then pick up such hitchhikers, almost guaranteed. And since these dead addicts have material cravings that now can never be satisfied, once you are possessed by one or more dead addicts, your own addiction will become that much harder for you ever to cure.
  • Executed Criminals. If you need another reason to be against capital punishment, you might think of this as the ultimate form of air pollution. What capital punishment does is to set loose upon the world an invisible disembodied spirit at the height of his deadly rage, who in life was a murderous criminal and knew that he was about to be killed and had a vicious motive and plenty of time before dying to plot his revenge upon the world. My goodness, talk about air pollution!

Just what is evil, anyway? Its literal definition would be the opposite of love, the opposite of spiritual growth, and therefore the opposite of what you and I are born here on earth to try to achieve.  So that is what evil is, and it is to be rejected in every way and at all costs.

The fortunate thing about evil, though, is that the more evil any entity is, the less power it has on the consciousness specrum. General wisdom has it that the most evil entities of all are the Shadow Men, who go around in top hats and capes scaring babies in the dark so they can feed on their screams, because otherwise they don’t have sufficient energy even to lift their heads, or to move at all. And if there is anything more pathetic than that, I cannot at the moment think of what it might be. But, yes, all these invisible negative dudes can trouble your peace if you ever let them in. 

So, how can you protect yourself from evil beings, and even from the devil itself? The only way that you really can protect yourself is by learning to ever more perfectly live in love. You can work on raising your personal consciousness vibration far above anger and fear, and then you can never again in your earthly life allow yourself to have an even remotely evil thought. The easiest way to do this is with the teachings of Jesus. You begin by loving God, and you spread your love for God to all of humankind, because remember that in Consciousness we are all one Being. You never watch a scary movie, either. You never read a scary book. And if there is, let’s say, a coldish place in your house, or a spot where you think that something evil might be trying to lurk, you send it only thoughts of love and kindness and pity. The last thing you must ever do is to be afraid of that cold spot in your darkened hallway! No. Instead, you love it. And even better, pity it. If you thought of yourself as a scary monster, wouldn’t you be demoralized and shrink away sadly if someone only pitied you? Say, “Oh, you poor little thing!” to it aloud, and really mean it, and you will feel the temperature rise in that dark corner. Oh my dear ones, I know how amazing this sounds, but in this great ultimate game of life, the Good Guys truly can always win!

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold.
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive!”
Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Accepting Design

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Two and two are four,
Four and four are eight,
Eight and eight are sixteen,
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…

Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic, you’ll likely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how lovely they are.

 Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
With such determination you’ll surely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

The one fact that will eventually prove fatal to the mainstream scientists’ atheist-materialist view of reality is the certainty that Some Intelligence designed this universe. If you study the scientific evidence with even minimal objectivity, then sooner or later you must conclude that the universe and the life that it contains simply cannot have developed randomly, or even semi-randomly. Anything with so many trillions of moving parts that all must have fit together precisely and consistently during its entire process of assembly and growth, and down to even its most minute details, or it all would instantly have collapsed in upon itself or altogether blown apart, simply cannot be the product of happenstance. That sentence, while overlong, is true. But nevertheless, mainstream scientists still carry blithely on with their atheist-materialist religion-like belief-system, while ignoring that plain truth’s profound implications.

This problem exists in even more precise detail with scientists’ ongoing attempts to investigate the origin and development of life on this planet. Scientists will notice only what they think is favorable to their atheist-materialist position, and will over-hype each isolated bit of what might look to them like a successful discovery, while ignoring the larger fact that mainstream scientists have made little or no real progress in establishing the probable origin of life in their more than a century of earnestly trying. In fact, the prestigious mainstream scientific journal Nature has just published a major critique of the efforts being made by scientists in the field of origin-of-life research. To quote from that Nature article, “Explaining isolated steps on the road from simple chemicals to complex living organisms is not enough. Looking at the big picture could help to bridge rifts in this fractured research field.” And, “The origins-of-life field faces the same problems with culture and incentives that afflict all of science — overselling ideas towards publication and funding, too little common ground between competing groups and perhaps too much pride: too strong an attachment to favoured scenarios, and too little willingness to be proved wrong.” Ouch. That Nature article’s authors helpfully list whole basic areas for research that mainstream origins-of-life researchers are ignoring, from how natural selection is targeted through where genes and proteins actually came from. And these authors are true believers in what the researchers they are critiquing are doing. They actually are trying to be helpful!

Meanwhile, of course, while the scientific gatekeepers rail pointlessly against what are in fact undeniable truths, mainstream science itself has more and more basic problems to address with even its most fundamental theories. For example, scientists still do not understand at all the dark energy that they theorize makes up a full two-thirds of this universe, while the 2022 Nobel Prize winners in physics earned their prize for proving that the universe is not even locally real. And in another groundbreaking recent Nature article, Oxford emeritus biologist Denis Noble calls for a major “rethink” of biology by charging that “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life” because this “view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date.” Wow. So right there are three major areas of science where a whole lot more fundamental work is going to be needed! We have been saying for a while in this space that when the scientific gatekeepers finally give up on enforcing materialism as their “fundamental scientific dogma,” they will have to largely rework or even altogether abandon most of the scientific discoveries of the past century; and more and more, that is looking to be a pretty sure bet. When you base the work of major fields of research on a flawed fundamental dogma like materialism, you are building your system on such a crooked foundation that inevitably, it is all going to fall apart.

Meanwhile, creationist scientists under the leadership of The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle continue to enjoy ever-increasing success. Their field of study is often referred to almost dismissively as “intelligent design,” but in fact they are fully credentialed scientists who just are broadly researching what is true. Their basic difference from mainstream science is that they don’t enforce any predetermined dogmas, and they simply welcome the obvious fact that of course there is a fundamental Intelligence behind it all. Researchers in this broad field test mainstream scientific theories, and they will incorporate them or parts of them wherever in their work that seems to make sense. I enjoy reading their newsletters, just as I do those sent by the major popular-science magazines. But while Popular Science and New Scientist will generally have pitifully little real news to offer, The Discovery Institute’s Evolution News is often full of the kinds of groundbreaking information that ought to be making headlines. Their new information would make for the most part the kinds of headlines, however, that Charles Darwin’s biggest supporters would likely be saddened to read.

Let’s look at a typical week’s sample of what the researchers whose work is featured by The Discovery Institute have lately had to say: 

  • Carnivory in Plants is a Problem for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. There are approximately 500 species of carnivorous plants, belonging to nine families and six different plant orders, so carnivory in plants must have arisen several times independently. Carnivorous plants use a number of different methods for catching their prey, and researchers now believe that the pitchers might have arisen seven times independently, adhesive traps at least four times, snap traps twice, and suction traps possibly also twice. The fact that each of these complex systems arose separately so many different times in plants poses a direct challenge to Charles Darwin himself, who said in the Origin of Species that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
  • “Junk DNA” May be a “Placeholder for Ignorance.” It is even now still assumed that some 90% of our genome is what is called “junk DNA,” which has no function; but upon closer study, a surprising amount of this so-called junk DNA does turn out to have an actual role to play. This article’s author says, “science writer Philip Ball, formerly a lead editor at the journal Nature, … is exasperated by junk DNA defenders who blithely assure the rest of the biological community that the non-functional portion of the human genome… can be fixed at 90 percent or thereabouts. The mindless processes of evolution, junk’s proponents say, are of course responsible for this huge putative junk percentage. As long as species continue to leave offspring, junk can accumulate in their genomes like so many cardboard boxes piling up in the attic, filled with school trophies and old sweaters. … Here is Ball’s proposed rule for molecular biologists: “stop assuming,” he writes, (that) “we know which parts of DNA matter and which don’t.” Take another look in that waste bin.
  • Stifling Opposition is the Real Anti-Science Position. Until recently, it has been fashionable to talk about the science on various matters as being “settled” in order to shut off debate. But the author here argues that no science is ever settled, and that shutting off scientific debate this way on anything is the antithesis of the actual scientific method. He offers wonderful examples of instances where the “experts” were wrong, from the need to close schools during the time of COVID through the purported uselessness of the actually quite useful human appendix. As he says, “Stifling the messy and contentious process required for scientific knowledge to advance undermines science. Yes, that means charlatans and frauds may, at times, successfully beguile the ignorant. But just like the most efficacious answer to bad speech is good speech, the way to overcome bad science is for good science to demonstrate its veracity. Attempts to short-circuit that contentious process betray the very purposes science is supposed to serve.”
  • Memories Are Not “Stored” in the Brain. Here a brief philosophical discussion helps us understand that memories are not material, and they cannot be stored in the same way that something that is physical can be stored in one’s back pocket. We might have expected a discussion of how those memories are stored in consciousness itself, but this careful author doesn’t go that far; he simply says, “Knowing is an ability to do something, and memories are our retained knowledge. I remember how to play chess and I remember my grandmother. That means I retain the ability to play chess and I retain the ability to recognize my grandmother. So that’s all memory is — retained knowledge.”
  • Does the World Need Another Book About Darwin? Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished by Robert F. Shedinger is just out, and his article about why he wrote the book makes for fascinating reading. Shedinger says that “In truth, The Origin of Species was an abstract of a much larger book on species that Darwin was working on (and that was three-quarters complete) before events forced him to put the larger book aside and instead publish a mere abstract of it. Once the Origin was in circulation, Darwin’s many correspondents anticipated that he would quickly follow up with the publication of his big book on species so they could better evaluate the argument for natural selection made in the Origin. Indeed, Darwin himself created this expectation both in the Origin and in his correspondence. … A rough, handwritten manuscript of Darwin’s big book, titled Natural Selection, survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1975. Yet despite the easy access scholars now have to this work (I bought a copy on Amazon), there has been little detailed engagement with its contents or comparison of this work with its abstracted form in the Origin. Such a comparison proves enlightening, for it serves to highlight the secondary nature of the Origin as a hastily written abstract rather than a finely honed scientific treatise, thus challenging the iconic status of the Origin as the foundational text of the modern biological sciences. This, of course, may be precisely why the big book gets overlooked. And in short, Shedinger finds that the ultimate book by Darwin, Natural Selection, never was finished and published because Darwin never was able to solve his theory’s most intractable problems.

Five interesting, well-reasoned, and scholarly articles. All of them balanced, useful, and worthy of a much broader audience than they will receive.

What gets me most of all when I compare the limited and dead-ended world of mainstream science with the open and joyous research of the creationists is the fact that most mainstream scientists, like that inchworm, really are missing so much! By looking at our reality so often first in terms of numbers; by self-limiting to the dogma that intelligence can never be a factor, and with the corollary dogma that matter must be primary; and finally by requiring so many scientists to need to seek funds for their separate little bits of research, mainstream science still is missing just about everything. Above all, as those articles in Nature lately have pointed out, mainstream science is missing altogether the beautiful and truly far beyond glorious Big Picture, which is what science really is supposed to be all about! 

Two and two are four, four and four are eight…
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are!
– Frank Loesser (1910-1969), from “Inchworm” (1952)

Forgiving

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

God hath not promised skies always blue,
flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.
God hath not promised sun without rain,
joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

God hath not promised we shall not know
toil and temptation, trouble and woe.
He hath not told us we shall not bear
many a burden, many a care.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

The best way to better understand anything is to attempt to teach it to others. And as we are moving through our first course on using the teachings of Jesus to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, which by the way I am very much enjoying, I am struck by how much better I can now see the way that Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness and His teachings on love fit together. Indeed, now I would say that until you first understand and can apply Jesus’s method of prevenient forgiveness, for you to love as Jesus wants us to love is probably impossible.

I invite emails from those who have questions or problems, so I hear from many people. And in answering thousands of emails over the years, I have been struck by some consistent strains. Nearly everyone I hear from is a lifelong Christian who has left daily church attendance and has a problem that in earlier years they might have taken to a clergyman; but since they have become un-churched, they think of me as the next best thing. What strikes me, though, is that these people generally have little to no spiritual resources. In all their lifelong church attendance, most of them have learned little of what Jesus taught beyond “love your neighbor.” They have learned almost nothing about how to reach out to God beyond The Lord’s Prayer, and they never have been given the spiritual depth to cope with earth-life’s many problems. Religions are supposed to be all about spirituality, and yet from what I can see there is little if any useful spirituality taught by any Christian denomination.

Your first thought will be that, well, this is a deeply un-spiritual age, so no wonder. But isn’t this something of a chicken-and-egg situation? If the world’s most prominent religion better taught its followers the importance of acquiring the basics of living a spiritual life, and how those basics can support us in times of trouble, then surely ours would be a far more spiritual period in human history! And sadly, modern Westerners who hear the word “spiritual” too often think we must be referring to Eastern religious practices. Or if we are talking about Christianity, they imagine that we are discussing mostly hymn-singing and after-services conviviality.

But our spiritual aspect is the most deeply human aspect of our lives. We eat and sleep and procreate, but so do all the beasts. The only thing that any of us has that the animals around us do not have is the core certainty that we are part of Something much greater than ourselves. And in accessing and dwelling in and feeding that certainty, we strengthen and empower its role in our lives. Our innate personal spiritual aspect then can be steadily nurtured, to the point where we rise spiritually beyond the need to incarnate on the earth ever again. And that, my dear friends, in secular terms is what spirituality is. There is nothing woo-woo about it. Best of all, growing spiritually makes you happy! Beyond anything else that the world has to offer, growing spiritually fills you with joy, and with a peaceful certainty that rights your whole life.

For each of us to do this spiritual work is our fundamental need as human beings. A Course in Miracles tells us that the Course itself is required; it is only the decision about when we are going to take it that is up to us. And ACIM is in fact just a much more elaborate version of the basic teachings of Jesus. Indeed, ACIM was channeled to us by Jesus. But whether we do it with ACIM or with a simpler version of the same thing such as the course that I am presently teaching, using the teachings of Jesus is the easiest way for us to achieve rapid and sustained spiritual growth. And we must do it. Until we do, we will keep returning to earth-lives – or “turning on the wheel,” as the Buddhists say – until eventually we decide to finally attend to our own essential spiritual needs.

And yet, growing spiritually is not difficult. In fact, growing spiritually as Jesus taught it is easy and enjoyable. Our primary problem is that the Christianity that the Romans designed at First Nicaea in 325 CE gives no thought at all to spiritual growth, and in fact its awful notion that Jesus was born to die for our sins only works to depress us spiritually. Christianity as the religion has been practiced turns the teachings of Jesus into just the nice thought that we should try to love and forgive. What a tragic waste! When instead, the real reason why Jesus was born was to bring to us the most effective means of rapid spiritual growth that ever has been taught by anyone.  

And the first, key step in the process is forgiveness. Not just everyday forgiveness, mind you, but an extreme type of forgiveness that is based in what scientists are only now learning are deep characteristics of the human brain. How Jesus two thousand years ago so clearly understood the inner workings of the human brain is something that I cannot fathom! But Jesus’s prevenient forgiveness trick absolves everyone and everything automatically; and in so doing, it deeply frees us, too. What I am coming to ever better see as I teach this class is not only how forgiveness and love are tied, with forgiveness necessarily coming before love; but also that our properly learning universal forgiveness in the aggressive way that Jesus taught it is essential if we are ever to get past the petty and selfish ego-based issues that too often keep us from learning to perfectly and wholeheartedly love our fellow man. Until we can forgive as Jesus taught us to forgive, instead of our being able to love as Jesus taught us to love, we always will have a kind of  “yellow light” step that requires that we first make sure that the person before us is in fact worthy of our love.

So to properly love, we must forgive everything! And this includes possible membership in a culturally disfavored class or race; a personal history that might include crime or other unsavory behaviors; and other things, right down to whatever negative interactions might have happened between us and the person we are trying to love. Jesus insists that we must forgive it all! When Jesus’s disciple Peter asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Or in other words, every single time.

Does our practicing universal prevenient forgiveness mean that we then will never feel anger? Not at all. But more spiritually developed people feel anger much less often. They will tend to feel it for great causes and for others being wronged, but usually not for wrongs against themselves. They also can quickly kill any angry impulse that might arise as they automatically forgive whatever might have provoked it. Even Jesus, who while He was on earth was  an extremely spiritually advanced being, did feel and act upon anger; but His was always appropriate anger, and very well controlled. Everyone knows that He had no use for clergymen, calling them hypocrites and false prophets. He treated them so differently from the way He treated everyone else that personally I think He may have literally despised them. But despite His sometimes fiery words against the clergy, Jesus’s anger was always under perfect control.

Jesus’s most notable bout of rage was what is called the cleansing of the Temple. “The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And within the Temple grounds He found those who were selling oxen, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.  And He made a whip of cords, and drove them all out of the Temple area, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, ‘Take these things away from here; stop making My Father’s house a place of business!’” (JN 2:13-16) My own spirit guide Thomas was Jesus’s friend in that lifetime. His role for Jesus was to go out among the people and report back what they were saying. And wonderfully, Thomas now tells me that he actually was there for the Temple cleansing. He saw it happen! He says that Jesus was then entered Jerusalem for His final Passover and His crucifixion. His work on earth was nearly done, and this was primarily a burst of frustration that He had been able to do so little to end these disrespectful practices. But his anger was mostly at the fact that He had run out of time, Thomas thought. And Jesus made the whip just to drive out the cattle. He didn’t hit the people!

Jesus taught an exercise that makes our obeying His command to practice prevenient forgiveness much easier. This exercise cleverly relies on innate characteristics of our minds, but it is physical so a how-to for doing it never made it into the Gospels. When I was trying to learn to forgive more aggressively back in 2011, Thomas taught it to me. And it works so amazingly well! It’s a way to force your mind to reverse the process of becoming angry, and to teach it never to be bothered by anything again. So using His method, you really can reprogram your mind to forgive beforehand everything that ever might happen in all the rest of your life. Later on I asked Thomas where that amazing exercise had come from, and that was when he told me that Jesus had taught it. Wow. So that was the reason why Jesus could so easily insist that people forgive everything, every time, even if some specific wrong was committed by the same person over and over again.

Having learned that the Apostles must have been teaching the making of forgiveness balls, just as I teach the process today, makes that first three hundred years after Jesus ascended feel more real to me. Here is my favorite passage from the Book of Acts, which is the fifth book of the New Testament. In some Bibles it’s called The Acts of the Apostles. This scene showcases the Apostle Paul, a man who began his career as a persecutor of the followers of Jesus, but then was recruited by Jesus Himself soon after His resurrection to become a great crusader for Jesus’s Way. Paul is the author of most of the letters that make up the bulk of our Bible’s New Testament. Given the adverse conditions under which he had to operate, it is lovely here to see Paul in action before a Greek governing council! Through him, we get a further delightful glimpse of what Jesus actually taught. And Paul clearly loves doing this, advocating for Jesus and the all-encompassing identity of the one true God:

Paul stood in the midst of the Council of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you! The God who made the world and everything that is in the world, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might feel around for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His descendants.’ Therefore, since we are the descendants of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and thought. So having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now proclaiming to mankind that all people everywhere are to reform their minds, because He has sent a Man whom He has appointed to teach the world in righteousness, having furnished proof to all people by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:22-31).

This is what Christianity should have been! With a heavy stress on celebrating the one true God “in whom we live and move and have our being,” and on God’s mastery of all creation and His centrality in each one of our lives, Paul announces that God has sent Jesus to teach and lead the world in righteousness, having first proven Jesus’s dominion by raising Him from the dead. Paul was speaking here just a decade or two after Jesus’s ascension. This was three hundred years before the Romans destroyed Jesus’s love-based Way and attached His name to their own fear-based religion.

Still, these years depicted in the Book of Acts were a time of persecution for Jesus’s followers. The courage that it took for Paul and the other Apostles repeatedly to speak so boldly and so publicly as they advocated for Jesus and His Way, even in Rome itself, is astounding. Every one of Jesus’s leading first followers died a martyr’s death, with many of His Apostles being crucified or beheaded. Paul was beheaded in Rome by the Emperor Nero around the year 64 CE; and Peter was crucified in Rome in the same year, having insisted upon being nailed to the cross upside-down, since he considered himself to be unworthy to die in precisely the same way that Jesus had died. Those in the next generation were often burned alive, either in coliseums or to provide light along roadways. Following Jesus in those early years was an occupation not for sissies. Even now, incredibly, there are people in this world being martyred for their refusal to renounce Jesus. And all of Jesus’s martyrs even to this day have one precious thing in common. With their last breath, they forgive their tormentors. In whatever language they speak, they often use the same words that Jesus used as His executioners were pounding nails into His wrists and feet. He said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34).

God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,
Swift, easy travel, needing no guide;
Never a mountain rocky and steep,
Never a river turbid and deep.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

Our Forefathers’ Gift

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

My native country, thee, land of the noble free, thy name I love!
I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills,
My heart will rapture fills like that above!

Let music swell the breeze and ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song.
Let mortal tongues awake, Let all that breathe partake,
Let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong!
– Samuel Francis Smith (1831-1895), from “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (1831)

One of our great shared possessions as human beings is a few sheets of parchment which are housed in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom on the second floor of the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. Faded and barely readable now, those documents are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights. And yes, I understand and I love the fact that our family of readers here is worldwide. But at this point, those documents belong to all of humanity. The five wise and far-seeing gentlemen who together led the process of designing the government of the United States of America cannot have known that they were creating what was going to become to date perhaps the most stable and beneficent and among the longest-lived governmental designs in all of human history. Four Virginians and one Bay Stater together created two hundred and thirty-eight years (and counting) of the same form of government of more than three hundred and thirty million people, all living together in one place.

This ability of our style of government to be so stable and so resilient is essential! Human beings as individuals can own and can do nothing on our own, so having a stable government which protects fundamental human rights is the first and most essential element of civilization. Without it, we cannot even own our own lives.

I apologize for this detour from our usual range of blog topics, but once in a while I come across what feels like a compelling reason to write about something else. And I am one of many Americans who have become alarmed to see how many of our next generation are taking for granted, and even are disparaging this incomparable gift that has been passed down to us by our forefathers. Those young folks’ problem is our failing public school system, which has ceased to teach our children as well as it has taught American generations past how very well our system of government works. And that is one danger that has been present from the beginning. As Benjamin Franklin was exiting the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a lady asked him what sort of government the attendees were designing. Franklin said, “A republic, madam. If you can keep it.”

George Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel 1984, said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Which is why the recent attacks on America’s Founders and their work for some of the personal details of their lives, and most often because some of them were slaveholders at a time when slaveholding was seen as less reprehensible than it is today, is so troubling. These attempts to destroy our young people’s understanding and appreciation of the value of their American heritage are unforgivable. And they are motivated by the short-term self-interest of a malicious few.  

The usual enemies of this precious system have been those to whom its protection of the rights of even the least of us has been seen as a challenge to the aggrandizement of their own power. It was seen as extraordinary by many at the time of this nation’s founding that the five most prominent Founding Fathers, who then became this nation’s first five presidents and all of whom were wealthy aristocrats, were so eager to give their power over to the people. King George III of England once remarked that if George Washington gave up his power after the American Revolution, he would be truly the greatest man in the world. But Washington gladly gave up his power after two presidential terms, and he thus began a tradition of no more than two terms for any American president. That tradition, after Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted a third term, was eventually enshrined into law.

I came to see and to understand the devotion that one of our Founding Fathers felt to the welfare of the common man. When my Thomas wanted to prove to Jesus that I was very well able to channel so I would for sure be able to channel Liberating Jesus for Him, Thomas led me in the late eighties (and long before I knew him as my spirit guide) to research and then to channel his own autobiography of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage, which spanned the American Revolutionary War. I knew nothing about Thomas’s motive in doing this at the time. I thought the book was just an historical novel, and I assumed that writing it was my own idea. But Thomas led me to do a great deal of historical research, and I came to know the American Revolutionary period, and especially the young Thomas Jefferson, pretty well. And when I say that he was young, I do mean that he was very young! The author of the Declaration of Independence was just thirty-three years old when he wrote what are this nation’s founding words. Here is how the Declaration of Independence begins:

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson was the youngest member of the Congress in 1776. That he was entrusted with the task of writing such an important document shows the esteem in which both he and his writing skills were held by his fellow Virginians. And whenever I mention the Declaration of Independence, I feel the need to point out two things:

  • Note that instead of the standard recitation of our rights to “life, liberty and property,” which would have given comfort to slaveholders, Jefferson changed the recitation of our unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which comforts all people equally. And it especially comforts the slaves.
  • The bulk of the Declaration of Independence is devoted to a recitation of grievances against the British, those “causes which impel them to the separation,” as he says in his first paragraph above. And you ought to read Jefferson’s first draft. It is a marvel of furious indignation at the way the British have polluted this pristine continent by introducing slavery here! Any other complaints were for him mere afterthoughts. Of course, for the southern states that never would have flown, so the Congress reworded his grievances section. But Jefferson bitterly hated slavery, and if his wife had not died at the end of the war, I am confident that he would have made ending slavery his life’s great cause. More on this below.

That generation of giants, as they often are called, were truly moral marvels. What was especially amazing to me when I was doing my research was that Thomas Jefferson, this highly educated young aristocrat, was so determined to take down his own class, and to elevate the farmers and shopkeepers and the poor. You had to love the guy! Some of his youthful writings survive, where he talks about how the time has come, and how important it is that the working class rise and rule itself. Karl Marx could not have said it better. Although, unlike Marx, Jefferson truly meant it.

Thomas Jefferson lived his childhood and youth on the edge of the great and still largely unexplored continental forest. He was confident that all that new, wild land and the yeomen who were going to fill it were the future. He loved Monticello, his mountain farm, and as the Revolutionary War moved toward its favorable conclusion, he began to make plans for his future life at Monticello with Martha, the woman he called Patty, the love of his life whom he had married as the war was beginning. But tragically, the life that Jefferson was planning with Patty was not to be, because she died of complications of diabetes in the late summer of 1782.

I don’t think that I much overstate the situation when I say that Patty’s death was the most pivotal event in American history between the America Revolution and the beginning of the twentieth century. Jefferson burned all his wife’s letters and papers after her death, which made writing My Thomas, my memoir/novel about their marriage and the Revolution more difficult. But it is easy to see just from the circumstances of her life and from Jefferson’s writings both before and after her death that she was an ardent abolitionist. Her father had been an importer of slaves, and she had a much-beloved slave stepmother and six deeply beloved slave half-siblings, all of whom were members of Thomas Jefferson’s household. While she was alive, her husband’s thoughts were ardently bent toward abolition.

In fact, thanks to Jefferson, Virginia was the first jurisdiction on earth to ban the importation of slaves. And as the war ended, so also did his life on the national stage. He gladly headed home to Monticello to spend the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer who had one remaining public task firmly in mind. With his wife by his side, he planned to end forever the curse of slavery in America. But first, he had to determine the best way to do it, so his mind at the time was full of what he thought of as his great experiment. He was worried that a general emancipation might have adverse implications for the slaves if they simply were freed into the much stronger and more numerous white population, since he had seen and been appalled by the miserable conditions of the freedmen in the northern cities. So he was planning to experiment first on his own farm as to the best way to effect his planned emancipation. Might doing it with a checkerboard of farms be best? But he was determined to work this out, and to make a universal American emancipation before the end of his life his one great cause. So if Patty had lived a normal lifespan, there likely would have been an American abolition and a full emancipation in the first part of the Nineteenth Century, and therefore there never would have been an American Civil War.

Instead, of course, Thomas Jefferson soon lost the love of his life, and with her he lost his abolitionist motor. He could no longer stand the sight of Monticello, so he abandoned his beloved home for decades. He sailed at once for France to assist in negotiating the peace, and he then became America’s first Secretary of State, its second Vice President, and the third President of the United States. Thomas Jefferson never married again, nor does it seem that he ever even had a lady friend; but instead, he mourned Patty for the rest of his life. Even in his old age, he still referred to his long-ago marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.” Now, his ten years of marriage spanned the Revolutionary War. So you know that has to have been some marriage!

Everyone wants Thomas Jefferson’s honest answer to the Sally Hemings question. And when eventually I asked my Thomas about it, rather than answering that question himself, he arranged for me to meet personally with the former president in the astral plane. I had already long since done the research and determined, based upon a lot of evidence, that Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, was the probable father of Sally Hemings’s children who had inherited Jefferson DNA (Sally also had a half-dozen children by other fathers). But meeting with my Thomas and also his Thomas Jefferson incarnation, both at the same time, was fascinating! In the astral plane you can feel people’s spiritual vibrations, and their vibrations are very similar but Thomas does vibrate higher. He urged me to ask the venerable president my question, but of course I was shy about doing that so frankly. When I did ask him the question, though, Thomas Jefferson said with the most wonderful soft Virginia accent, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Spoken like a gentleman.

 A friend and political ally of Thomas Jefferson asked the retired president to give some advice to his young son, Thomas Jefferson Smith, who had been named after Jefferson. A little more than a year before Jefferson died, he composed a letter to be given to the boy when he was old enough to appreciate it. Jefferson enclosed some practical advice, such as “Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold,” and “When angry, count ten before you speak. If very angry, a hundred.” But the most moving part is the letter itself, which consists of the following “few words”:

Monticello, February 21, 1825

 This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. 

 

Our Father God to Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee I sing.
My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty,
For all eternity, let freedom ring! Let freedom ring!
Samuel Francis Smith (1831-1895), from “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (1831)

 

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